Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week – all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue – and not a vice – to love myself, since I am a human being too.
Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge.
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
Men are born equal but they are also born different.
A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.
Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.
Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.
You have to stop in order to change direction.
I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.
Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.
Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.
People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is difficult.
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.